Practice focus · Digital & Derivatives
The instruments arrived before the plumbing did.
Perpetual futures came onshore, tokenized securities reached the exchanges, and a tokenized ETF was posted as margin at a clearing house — all inside twelve months, and all without the market-structure statute that was supposed to authorize it. What arrived instead was a set of instruments running on a settlement layer that still keeps banking hours.
This section covers both halves: the contract mechanics — funding, margin, liquidation, settlement-window construction — and the collateral rail underneath them, where the more durable structural change is happening.
1 · What you actually own — the asset framework
Before an instrument can be designed on an asset, someone has to say what the asset is and how it behaves. Every crypto taxonomy in circulation classifies the claim and stops, which is a communication device rather than a risk model. This three-part series builds an alternative from the bottom up: one asset studied to exhaustion, then three more for class diversification and three sampling horizons, then a classification framework tested on a 53-asset panel — and reported honestly when the panel refuses to confirm it.
Part III · A three-layer taxonomy — what you own, how it behaves, when it pays — tested to destruction on 53 assets. The class labels do not survive the residuals: average residual correlation across all pairs is −0.019 and cluster purity is 0.49, with the clusters organised by vintage and venue rather than by claim. What the market does price as a group is a cohort none of the schemes name
Part II · ZEC, ETH, UNI and DOGE at daily, weekly and monthly frequency. Beta is a property of the asset, not the sampling interval — but events split into impulse, diffusion and reflexive signatures with different clocks, and the regime gate runs at the class's own frequency. A momentum row without a horizon tag means nothing
Part I · Ten years, 308 dated events, nine regimes. Bitcoin beta explains 30–50% of weekly variance throughout and the asset still lost 99.2% against it — beta told you the day, the shielded pool told you the decade. Twelve factor-ledger rows, each with a stated test
2 · Perpetuals — the format that came onshore
A perpetual is a funding-rate mechanism wearing a futures contract. It arrived in the US regulated perimeter faster than the margin frameworks around it did, which makes the design details load-bearing rather than academic.
Coinbase lists a perp-style S&P 500 contract onshore on August 17 while the benchmark's owner sues to have the format declared swaps — and both of CME's moats point in opposite directions
The CFTC's approvals read across four design philosophies, and what each choice implies for funding, margin and the shape of the book
Binance, Bybit, OKX, Hyperliquid, dYdX, Coinbase Derivatives and Deribit compared across 18 dimensions of margin, liquidation, ADL and insurance-fund design — anchored on the $19B cascade
A pre-IPO perpetual at a 526% access premium: offshore synthetic price discovery for a restricted equity with no arbitrage channel, plus the oracle-handoff problem
3 · Contract design from first principles
Where the practice specifies rather than observes: full instrument designs — settlement window, funding construction, margin treatment — and the no-arbitrage relationships that discipline a listed complex.
Contract design on COMEX GC/SI VWAP with cash-carry funding — the ratio product that completes a no-arbitrage triangle rather than adding a fourth outright
Gold, silver and platinum filed; the ratio contract that wasn't. Funding assembled from the venue's own prints, margin on ratio vol rather than two gross legs, and the FX-cross precedent
SSF market structure read against the financing it competes with, and where the perpetual format changes the calculus
4 · The settlement layer — what actually moves the money
The most consequential thread here, and the one furthest from the instruments themselves. Trading went continuous; the settlement rail underneath it did not. Everything about tokenized collateral follows from that gap.
US markets trade 58 hours a week — 34.5% of the week — with no central-bank settlement rail open, and the Fed's own expansion closes only 22 of them. Saturday never opens, which makes a private settlement asset permanent infrastructure
Three GENIUS reserve funds in seven weeks, only one tokenized — and a five-registration intermediary now performing Cede & Co.'s function without Cede & Co.'s oversight regime
FINRA-authorized tokenized NMS equities anchored at the transfer agent rather than an offshore wrapper: financing disintermediation, the wrapper-basis haircut, securities lending and the dual-book seam
5 · Margin, collateral and what breaks under stress
The connective tissue across everything above — and the part of the practice that comes directly from clearing-house risk work rather than from observation.
BTC/SPX perpetuals against event-contract binaries in one portfolio-margin framework, with 5,000-path Monte Carlo, an implied-vol surface and venue-aware margin comparison
Also in Predictive MarketsWhy a perp liquidation mark — a median of a capped multi-exchange composite — cannot be pushed, while an intraday event settlement can, and what a visible liquidation cluster does to that asymmetry
Also in Predictive MarketsWhere this connects
The threads that run out of this one.
Event contracts share the margin framework and, increasingly, the venues — and the settlement-hardness question is the same one asked of a different print.
Energy & computeCompute credit is being distributed on these rails, and the index-governance critique developed there applies wherever a contract settles on someone's number.
Market structure radarContract filings, listings and regulatory shifts across perpetuals, tokenized assets and the settlement layer, tracked continuously.